2017 General weather forecast: North America?

[BikeFreak]

Hi,

In 3 weeks I plan on biking across Canada (East to West) and then down towards Mexico following the Sierra Cascades route. I was wondering if there are some general weather forecasts for the summer of 2017. Extreme heat, El nino, etc etc. Anyone with info?

Lucas

[jrswenberger]

Hi,

In 3 weeks I plan on biking across Canada (East to West) and then down towards Mexico following the Sierra Cascades route. I was wondering if there are some general weather forecasts for the summer of 2017. Extreme heat, El nino, etc etc. Anyone with info?

Lucas

Yes...you'll see it all on a trip that long.

Enjoy the ride,
Jay

[DaveB]

A favorite saying of mine is: "Climate is what you expect.  Weather is what you get."  A general longterm forecast is nearly useless.

[zzzz]

Lucas:

You may (or may not) be familiar with a statistition named Nate Silver who turned his talents towards forecasting political races here in the US and for being quite accurate. He wrote a book titled "The Signal & the Noise" in which he detailed how probabilities are determined and why prognostication in many fields is so often wrong. It's not as dry as it sounds and is a pretty good read.

One of his favorite ways to demonstrate his points in the book is talking about weather forecasts because it's real easy to check it out that when a forecast calls for 20% chance of rain, whether or not it rained the 2 out of 10 times that was predicted.

Here's where I get to the  point of my reply:

Statistically, the 10 day forecast is 0% better than finding out what the average high /low/ chance of rain has historically been for that given place on that given day. The weather service keeps putting out the 10 day (& longer) forecasts hoping to fine tune the modeling so it works better than the average and people want to see it, but it's really pretty useless.

You've done a lot of touring so I'm sure you know already, the weather will be what the weather will be.

Have a good trip,

Pete

[indyfabz]

A favorite saying of mine is: "Climate is what you expect.  Weather is what you get."  A general longterm forecast is nearly useless.

Heh. I started a tour from Missoula on 6/18. (Just got back yesterday.) As I was eating breakfast at the KOA I checked Weather.com Told me it was sunny with 0% chance of precipitation. It was actually drizzling out at that very moment. Before I flew out the long range forecast was for temps in the low 80s. Most days turned out to be in the low 90s.

[jamawani]

Mostly sunny to partly cloudy with a chance of rain.

[BikeFreak]

What I was referring to: If I experience high temperatures this summer - is it a normal summer or an unusually hot summer? Maybe some meteorologists have posted some comments for the summer already. Moreover, sitting 10000 km away I have no idea what the summer is like in North America right now. As a comparable side note: I read somewhere on the internet that the summer of 2016 was very hot in New England - much hotter than normal.

[indyfabz]

As a comparable side note: I read somewhere on the internet that the summer of 2016 was very hot in New England - much hotter than normal.

That's not comparable to "What's it going to be like this summer?" since it's an after-the-fact assessment. And comments about the summer so far are not reliable predictors of next month or even next week. As noted above, just before I left for my tour some meteorologist told me I was supposed to have appreciably cooler weather than I ended up having. I would avoid putting stock in his/her opinion.

[Pat Lamb]

What I was referring to: If I experience high temperatures this summer - is it a normal summer or an unusually hot summer? ...  As a comparable side note: I read somewhere on the internet that the summer of 2016 was very hot in New England - much hotter than normal.

Unfortunately, no one can say ahead of time.  And since you're planning to ride (conservative guess) 6,000 miles, you'll experience 2-4 months of weather.  You can get somewhat reliable forecasts for about a week.  So plan for everything.

Beware of meteorologists or climatologists with some exposure to statistics.  Statistical "normal" means normal English "average."  So when somebody says the summer of 2016 was much hotter than normal, they mean it was much hotter than average.  It's confounded by the fact that normal (English) weather on a given day is often 15-20 degrees hotter or colder than normal (statistics).  When the weather is 2F above or below average, the weather man says it's not normal.  It really is normal, it's just different than the average for the date over the time records have been kept.

[walks.in2.trees]

You can get a general idea at wunderground.com by checking out weather history at key locations during key weeks along your route... As they say above though, you get what you get, and the only gaurantee is that whatever they predicted, it probably won't be correct... But at least you'll know that in certain places to need to either buy a coat, or can give one way to a homeless guy before you go on to the next way-point

Sent from my SM-T817V using Tapatalk

[cyclistdave]

turns out the midwest is having EXTREME heat. Local cyclists bonking right and left.

Be careful. Go slow. Stay hydrated.